Stu Oxley, “Untitled,” 2015

acrylic on canvas, 84” x 84"

Like many abstract artists, Stu Oxley struggles to talk about his work, gesturing toward his process, searching for an apt metaphor, telling a story, even laughing a little at himself. With art that is primarily visual – work so subtle that it obviously comes from a quiet and deeply interior place – commonplace adjectives like ephemeral or ineffable, conceptual understandings of things like the sublime, or even the language of metaphysics and spirituality, somehow all fall short.

Really, all you can do is look and feel, losing yourself in patches of opacity, sensing a rough scrape as if it were etched into your own skin, or sinking into a wash of colour as if it were a warm bath. When you’re in that state, it’s possible to realize that a few drops of robin’s egg blue amid a spray of white on a light-dappled monoprint that seems as translucent as skin is the most exciting thing you have seen all day.

Stu Oxley, “Untitled,” 2017

monotype on paper, 23” x 34"

This is the magic of abstraction. You look deeply and you go someplace else, forgetting momentary concerns. You slip into a larger field of awareness, your nerves a little raw, perhaps, your breath faster, trembling even, apprehending less through the mind than the body. At it’s best, abstract art makes you feel like your skin has grown eyes. I suspect this is a state similar to the consciousness of early childhood, when the world, everything so fresh and new, first seeped into us. It’s the same energy that can catapult you back through time, when, say, you see a scrape of old paint on a kitchen wall, and sob for no reason you can discern.

When I speak to Oxley at his home in Elora, Ont., on a line filled with static, his voice drifts in and out, clear for a moment, then murky. I catch a word, a phrase, then lose a paragraph. My mind, propped open by a deep meditation, is still aware of space pulsating around me. My questions are vague, his answers equally so. Oxley too is a meditator. Our conversation begins to resemble an aural version of his work – about nothing and everything, all at the same time. I ask the title of his upcoming show at Calgary’s Paul Kuhn Gallery. It takes several tries to hear him: Distant Still.

Stu Oxley, “Untitled,” 2015

acrylic on canvas, 36” x 36"

Oxley, who paints, draws and makes prints, talks about layers in his work, how he denies previous marks and gestures, covering them over, much the way meditators recognize thoughts, but refuse to engage them. He mentions waiting for hours, for days, sometimes a month, to make his next mark. He circles like a koan, describing a previous show, a room full of his work as “so silent it was loud.” He jokes, sort of, that making art is an addiction. That he’s lost without it. Then he revisits the statement: It's an addiction, yes, but also therapy, and discovery too. In short, it is the process of life, moments in time, one after another.

At one point, Oxley recalls how his father would compare sudden silences at the family’s dinner table to a passing angel. “I would look for the angels,” says Oxley. “But I could never find them.” ■

Distant Still is on view at the Paul Kuhn Gallery from April 14 to May 12, 2018.